The development literature has long been divided into two camps. In one corner are researchers who evaluate development projects and seek ways to improve efficiency, outcomes and impacts. In the other corner, critical scholars paint the development industry as instrumental to a hegemonic global order. This, at least, is the dichotomy Erin Beck paints at the very outset of the book and hopes to eschew. Instead, Beck asks how development projects are constituted and what they actually do, hoping to reveal tensions that often go unexplored and to explain why development NGOs continue to be a ubiquitous feature of the social landscape throughout the Global South despite frequent failures.
How Development Projects Persist, a product of multiple field visits to Guatemala from 2006 onward, is a comparative institutional ethnography of two microfinance NGOs catering to rural indigenous women. Otherwise, the two NGOs differ – sometimes dramatically – in terms of origins, motivations, organisational structure and culture, ideology and development models. Beck's approach divides actors into beneficiaries and developers, the latter being further subdivided into funders, policymakers, leaders and workers. Beck looks at the liminal spaces where these actors meet, examining power dynamics and clashing needs, expectations and worldviews. Though beneficiaries are not subdivided into discrete sub-categories, the author pays attention to the differentiated lived experiences – based on race, education, income and personal motivations – of over 250 women she has surveyed or interviewed, some of whose stories appear in vignettes scattered throughout.
After an overview of development failures in Guatemala, two chapters are allocated to each of the two featured NGOs, Namaste and the Fraternidad de Presbiteriales Mayas (Fraternity of Maya Presbyterials), the first chapter focusing more on the organisation itself, the second on the experiences of the beneficiaries. Namaste is a US-based secular NGO founded by a California-based accountant and entrepreneur entering the later stages of his career with a desire to ‘give back’. Namaste abides by what Beck calls a ‘bootstrap model’ of development, where poverty is seen as a product of lack of resources and know-how. Namaste places its faith in the market as a vehicle of development and provides access to credit and business training, striving to produce entrepreneurial subjects who will become successful businesswomen. A bureaucratic organisation focused on delivering quantifiable results, Namaste meticulously monitors its workers’ activities in the field. As a result, the interactional spaces co-produced by Namaste's developers and beneficiaries resemble what Beck calls ‘development hallways’, linear structures with little room to manoeuvre.
The Fraternity, in contrast, emerged out of the Presbyterian Church and adopted a ‘holistic model’ of development, seeing poverty as both cause and consequence of lack of resources, self-esteem and cultural identity. Founded by religious Guatemalan women, the Fraternity is more sensitive to local contexts and histories, often adapting not only its on-the-ground activities but also abstract concepts like feminism to the reality of the communities it serves. The Fraternity operates on a charismatic organisational model, where decisions are made on an ad-hoc basis, often on the whims of its leaders, and record-keeping and monitoring are minimal. The organisation nevertheless attempts to discipline their beneficiaries and produce ‘good Christian Mayan women’ subjects, using microcredit merely as a recruitment tool. The Fraternity's less rigid organisational structure and attentiveness to local contexts results in what Beck calls ‘multipurpose rooms’, where beneficiaries and workers are afforded more space and freedom to exercise their agency.
Beck aptly demonstrates how tensions arise from different actors’ worldviews, life experiences and habitus, which lead all actors to constantly ‘Other’ each other. Actors’ creative responses to these tensions – collusion, shortcuts and subterfuge – are a sort of ‘weapons of the weak’ adapted to the development context. While the notion that beneficiaries are not passive recipients but agents of development in their own right – one of the conclusions highlighted by the author in the final chapter – is not in itself novel, the book's thick ethnographic data, undoubtedly one of its strengths, effectively illustrates how organisational structures can constrain or enable agency. The book's ethnographic actor-based approach is in that sense indeed a blueprint for future research in this direction.
However, the book's ultimate argument – that development projects persist because they become ‘imbricated in the daily strategies and meanings of diverse beneficiaries and developers operating in particular contexts in significant but unexpected ways’ (p. 7) – is somewhat underwhelming. By trying to eschew the dichotomy she paints between mainstream and critical development studies, Beck ultimately engages with neither literature, resulting in conclusions that feel more like self-evident statements than theoretical contributions. And yet Beck's actor-based methodology can provide new insights for both the mainstream and critical camps. For example, the gap between a project's intended and actual outcomes and impacts is traditionally attributed to development institutions’ increasing loss of control further down the impact chain. Beck provides an alternative explanation, illustrating how this gap is produced, at least partially, by the tensions she identifies. This conclusion, and its resulting recommendation for double-loop learning, is a relevant contribution for researchers interested in improving development practices. Similarly, from a critical development studies perspective, Beck's actor-based approach could have provided useful insights into how hegemonic tendencies are actually translated down the aid chain. While the influence of funders and international trends is present throughout the narrative, it is not afforded much attention. Though it was Beck's explicitly stated decision to avoid such questions, this choice nevertheless makes the book less interesting than it could have been.
Despite the absence of such higher-level analysis and an underwhelming answer to the titular inquiry, the book demonstrates the potential of an ethnographic actor-based approach to development studies. Most importantly, Beck renders explicit the underlying tensions that any development worker will recognise. How Development Projects Persist provides valuable thick data that is recommended for all students and practitioners of international development.
